A colleague and I recently published our results on drivers of customer retention, in the European Journal of Marketing. EJM is a double-blind, peer-reviewed, academic journal. We set out to identify which of a number of management disciplines contributed to improved customer retention.
We generated data from a random sample of manufacturing and service organisations in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer settings. We examined the impact of retention planning, executive responsibility, retention budgeting and complaints-handling on customer retention outcomes.
Our analysis shows that only one variable is significantly associated with customer retention excellence, and that is the presence of a documented complaints-handling process. None of the other variables we tested were significant. Does that surprise you?